neb, n. regional - mainly Scottish, Irish English (northern) and English (northern)There is, at first sight, no seasonal connection between this month’s word and early Autumn, although as the winds increase their strength and the rainstorms start to hit the British Isles, the consequent rise in coughs and colds may lead us to pay a little more attention to our noses. I write this piece with a strong cold myself, sneezing and snuffling, and wiping my neb with great frequency.‘Neb’ is a word that Nicholson uses only three times in his Collected Poems (1994). But what a word! It is so clearly regional, and acknowledged as such by both the Oxford English Dictionary and the Dictionary of the Scots Language [Dictionar o the Scots Leid]. Incidentally, the Scots Dictionary is freely available online, and is a fantastic resource for those interested in regional forms of English [www.dsl.ac.uk]. ‘Neb’ is a great word for a writer to use, especially one interested in the links between human beings and nature, as Nicholson was. Primarily, it means a bird’s beak, according to the English and Scots dictionaries, but by extension it also signifies ‘a person’s nose’ (OED), ‘a projecting part or point, as a peak, tip, toe, spout…the extremity of anything ending in a point or narrowed part’ (OED) and ‘the whole face; the snout of an animal’ (DSL). The sharpness associated with the beak and the keenness connected to the nose mean that the word – in Scots at least – has also come to be associated with liquor (especially whisky) and with the chilly air – another seasonal link! And it doesn’t take a great deal of thought to realize that ‘neb’ is also related to the word ‘nib’ (the point of a pen) and to ‘nab’ (a promontory). This tiny word, then, manages to combine many of Nicholson’s interests within it: a liking for the local and regional; a sharp attention to detail; a fondness for whisky (well-attested); and a love of nature, rocks, landscape, and bird-life. The fact that Norman also had a strong and shapely neb of his own adds a little touch of humour to this investigation. And although the writer’s nib was often replaced by a typewriter in Nicholson’s case – to spare his readers the difficulty of trying to make sense of his notoriously cryptic handwriting – yet the poet’s first thoughts may well have flowed onto paper through the neb of the nib.The first use of the word ‘neb’ in the Collected Poems is in Section V of the ‘Seven Rocks’ sequence: Mountain Limestone, Lower Carboniferous: By the Duddon Estuary. This part of the sequence is most local to Nicholson himself, dealing as it does with the treasure of iron ore contained in the limestone of Millom. Nicholson imagines the limestone as ‘prudent stone, secretive sea-beast bone’, guarding metaphorical ‘rubies and blood-red gold’ deep within it. The imagery here combines the actual stony remains of the creatures that formed the limestone with an imagined dragon-like animal which watches over the treasure. This dragon-rock is also something of a miser, locking its ‘skeleton fingers’ over ‘the paunch of gold /bladders and blebs of old / Distilled, filtered gold’. It is at this point in the poem that the ‘neb’ image appears: Long-shank diviners standProdding and probing the land,And steel nebs boreDown to the hoard of ore…(CP p. 248)Here Nicholson brilliantly combines mechanical mining imagery with bird-imagery – the long-shanked birds of the seashore being like the steel gantries used to support the prospecting drills, and their long prodding beaks like the drills themselves. Human beings and their life-essential activities are shown here as having something deeply in common with the activities of the birds, searching the silt for sustenance. Although Nicholson could be extremely critical of the ecological damage that humankind inflicts on the natural world, here he clearly perceives mining and its related industries as part of the same cyclical processes which produced the rock and its ore. The last lines of this section make this very clear:… a new life is built uponThe buried treasure of the bone.The second use of the word ‘neb’ comes in the much later poem ‘Have You Been to London?’ (CP pp. 295-6) in which the poet evokes the local and particular habitat of his grandmother as he knew it in his adolescent years – her sharp tongue and acuteness, and her own sense of confidence in her place, being set against the boy’s wider knowledge of the world, a knowledge which is somehow more wind-blown and desolate than the hearth-comforts of the old lady’s smaller world. ‘Neb’ here is the spout of the kettle, in the past kept constantly simmering on the range, but now – metaphorically – ‘long burned dry’. The choice of the local word here is so apt since the poem as a whole seems to depict not only the ultimate loss of the grandmother, but also of almost everything her world represented. From that world Nicholson recovers the use of ‘neb’ to precisely describe the beak-like spout of the kettle. And the OED has recorded Nicholson’s usage in this context too: this is one of the 18 citations of Nicholson’s writings within the OED, used here to exemplify meaning number 5: ‘A projecting part or point…’. Finally, Nicholson used the word ‘neb’ in the compound ‘neb-fulls’ (on the analogy of ‘spoonful’) in ‘The Cock’s Nest’ (CP p. 310), the affecting poem about the death of Nicholson’s father. Here the empty-feeling rooms of the house he shared with his father all his life (except for the almost two years spent in a TB sanatorium in Hampshire) are compared to the empty nest of the male wren, who had built a nest in the backyard in the hope of attracting a mate. ‘She didn’t choose our yard’ the poet tells us, leaving us with the sense that the blessing of new life hasn’t touched the poet’s home in that spring of his father’s death. The meticulousness and care of the male bird in creating its nest is well-caught in the word ‘neb-fulls’ as it slowly builds up its nest with its nippings of ‘soot-spored moss’. The parallel with Nicholson’s father, a gentlemen’s outfitter in a small, poor industrial town, building up a living for his little family (Norman himself, and his stepmother, Rosetta), penny by penny from the many hours of his labour, is not spelled out, but is clear from the context. ‘Neb-fulls’, then, are tiny quantities of material, all that can be fitted into a beak.Interestingly, the DSL gives the Scottish form ‘nebfu a beakful, hence a small quantity, a drop, esp. of liquor’.And thus we come once more to the daily usefulness of that little word: the nip of whisky we can imagine Nicholson granting himself each evening as his nightcap, especially in this wet and blustery season. Antoinette Fawcett October 2014

After-noteDavid Boyd, a member of the Norman Nicholson Society, and the author of the forthcoming Norman Nicholson: A Literary Life, has given me the following information which fills out the bird/machinery imagery in the poem ‘By the Duddon Estuary’:

‘I recall that there's a recording of NN reading one of his poems (‘The Borehole’) about prospecting for ore deposits in the waters of the Duddon Estuary, where he likens the steel drilling towers to Jammy Cranes, i.e. herons. Man is pecking at the land for possible substance just as herons do. I don't think the process for prospecting on dry land was much different, save that not such high drill support rigs were required – I think they looked rather like three legged beanpoles, and if they found ore deposits amongst the limestone rock they'd either extend existing nearby underground mine workings or sink a new shaft to the deposits found. Hematite tends to occur in big separate clusters amongst hard rock as opposed to, for example, coal in seams, which is why tin miners, as hard rock miners, were the people who knew all about extracting it, including of course NN's stepmother's family, the Sobeys.David Boyd’s forthcoming literary-critical biography can be pre-ordered on the following website: http://norman-nicholson-bio.com. More information about iron mining in the Millom area can be found on this website: http://www.cumbria-industries.org.uk/a-z-of-industries/iron-mining.